Please join us this Friday, May 5th, for Brooke Tuma's MFA exhibition, National Subversive, presented at the School of Art Satellite Gallery (1108 5th Street) during the May First Friday Art Trail.
Tuma's first interaction with how photographs impact perception was in the form of National Geographics stacked on Brooke's grandparent's shelves. This magazine with its recognizable yellow borders became the lens through which Americans would view the world and Tuma was not absent from this lens. Each brightly colored page with its smooth glossy finish tinted Brooke's perception of foreign and domestic lands and the people who live there. Quickly the magazine created the notion of "us" versus "them".
In National Geographic Subversive Series, Tuma uses the same magazines that were one on her grandparent's shelves and cover them in the organic cleaner, citrus solve. This cleanser lifts the highly pigmented informs of the clay-coated pages, dissolving and abstracting creating a dichotomy between a plant-based cleaners that effortlessly lifts the ink off a magazine that continues the romanticization of landscapes photography. Through the erasure of National Geographic imagery, Tuma's work embraces the imperative fo collaborating with the photographic material and land rather than consuming it.
Brooke Tuma is a visual artist from Kansas who works primarily with photographic processes. in 2020, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts with a concentration in photography from Kansas State University. Her work has been exhibited in several group exhibitions such as Coming Together in Conversation, at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 8th Annual International Combined Caucus Exhibition at Box 13 Artspace in Houston, Texas juried by Zackary Drucker, Potlatch at CASP Work Studios D, in Lubbock, Texas and most recently Trash, Glass, and Silos, at CAPS Live/Work Studios Studio 2 in Lubbock, Texas.